Ninety-nine percent of the ocean's plastic is missing

[n2doc]

Millions of tons. That’s how much plastic should be floating in the world’s oceans, given our ubiquitous use of the stuff. But a new study finds that 99% of this plastic is missing. One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it.

If that’s the case, “there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web,” says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. “And we are part of this food web.”

Humans produce almost 300 million tons of plastic each year. Most of this ends up in landfills or waste pits, but a 1970s National Academy of Sciences study estimated that 0.1% of all plastic washes into the oceans from land, carried by rivers, floods, or storms, or dumped by maritime vessels. Some of this material becomes trapped in Arctic ice and some, landing on beaches, can even turn into rocks made of plastic. But the vast majority should still be floating out there in the sea, trapped in midocean gyres—large eddies in the center of oceans, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

To figure out how much refuse is floating in those garbage patches, four ships of the Malaspina expedition, a global research project studying the oceans, fished for plastic across all five major ocean gyres in 2010 and 2011. After months of trailing fine mesh nets around the world, the vessels came up light—by a lot. Instead of the millions of tons scientists had expected, the researchers calculated the global load of ocean plastic to be about only 40,000 tons at the most, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We can’t account for 99% of the plastic that we have in the ocean,” says Duarte, the team’s leader.

more

http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/06/ninety-nine-percent-oceans-plastic-missing

[Bosonic]

1. Dark plastic !

or some bacteria's evolved to digest it.

[Igel]

2. Or it sinks.

Or it's chemically degraded.

Or the assumption about how much we "have" (presented as fact when it's actually a deduction) is incorrect.

Or it's hiding someplace that they're not looking.

Or something else.

[undeterred]

3. Or its in the same place as the missing plane MH370

[defacto7]

4. I think the point is

it isn't missing. It's there, they just don't know where or what it's turning into.

If it is sinking to the bottom there could be some real problems arise from the possibility of killing important bacteria cycles disrupting the cycle of oxygen/CO2. If the oxygen is missing at depths, the chemistry of the ocean floor begins to make sulfur dioxide instead which is one hell of a deadly gas to all oxygen breathing life forms including us. That is not fixable, and that chemical change has happened at least 5 times in earth's history killing 99.999 percent of life on earth including plant life.

There are other things that can cause that chemical change like raising the cyclic water temperature about 2 degrees C. but adding micro-plastics to the mixture accelerates the inevitable.

[cstanleytech]

7. Or there could be something deep in the ocean itself thats eating the plastic like its candy and

its perfectly safe for it to do so.
Granted its a long shot on that one but it cant be ruled out completely as the simple fact is we know little about what all lives down in the bottom of the ocean since its such a difficult part of the earth for us to explore.

[defacto7]

8. It's an idea...

but I think it can be ruled out completely unless there is a reasonable hypothesis for such a thing at which point I wouldn't rule out the possibility. Then we would need evidence before we could add it to any useful consideration in a study. The razor would definitely rule it out. But it's nice to imagine such a thing, it's just not a useful theory.

[groundloop]

5. A 1970s estimate isn't a real accurate gauge of how much plasic is actually in the ocean

And from the article: The estimated amount of plastic entering the ocean that the study uses is almost half a century old, and “we’re desperately in need of a better estimate of how much plastic is entering the ocean annually.”

One thing mentioned in the article as a source of plastics in oceans is runoff from landfills. A possibility to ponder, IMO, is that in the 50 years since that 0.1% estimate was made is that we've gotten better at building landfills. Another is that a lot more plastic is recycled than 50 years.

[defacto7]

6. Plastic debris contaminates 88 percent of ocean’s surface

Plastic debris contaminates 88 percent of ocean’s surface, report says

also:

The report, titled “Global Warming Releases Microplastic Legacy Frozen in Arctic Sea Ice,” said ice in some remote locations contains at least twice as much plastic as previously reported areas of surface water such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area of plastic waste estimated to be bigger than the state of Texas.

Arctic ice melt to release 1 trillion pieces of plastic into sea